Facilities

The Nevada INBRE Bioinformatics Core

The Nevada INBRE Bioinformatics Core was established in 2001 with funding from from Nevada INBRE and NSF EPSCoR to meet the growing bioinformatics needs of Nevada researchers. The Core administers computer equipment and software, provides bioinformatics IT support and bioinformatics programming, performs data analysis, and offers training and workshops on the methods and tools of analysis.

Office

Our ADA compliant office features: seating and workstations for three personnel and up to five visiting faculty or students; two meeting rooms; robotic video conferencing; projectors; wireless Internet; kitchenette; and restrooms.

Computational Resources

The Core computing resources are among the most advanced on the University of Nevada, Reno campus. We have four high-performance staff workstations, five visitor desktops, and twelve servers that run state-of-the-art software for biomedical and life science research.

The heart of Core operations are our servers. Their combined resources amount to 240 CPUs, 1.4TB RAM, 140TB storage, and they are interconnected with a 10 Gigabit network. Each server is configured in one of three roles: computation, storage or infrastructure.

Core compute servers are pooled to form a single cluster of 128 CPUs and 768GB RAM. This cluster is operated by Core staff and is used for client jobs and software development.

Core data is stored on three distributed storage clusters. Data begins life on our 7TB high-performance cluster that is designed to fully utilize our 10Gbps network and maximize our compute cluster performance. Once jobs are completed, they move to our 40TB, highly redundant, long-term storage cluster. This cluster is backed up by our 40TB backup and archiving system.

Core infrastructure servers provide the following services: virtualization, remote file transfer, web, databases, source control, logging, monitoring, alerting, virtual private network, cluster scheduling, and authentication. Their work is not glorious, but their services form the foundation of our streamlined system.

Computational Research Grid

The Computational Research Grid is a University-wide resource designed to fulfill the high-performance computing needs of the University of Nevada, Reno campus. The Grid is composed of 27 compute nodes, a storage array, and a head node. The combined resources of The Grid amount to 432 CPUs, 7TB RAM, and 150TB storage. The Core utilizes The Grid when jobs exceed the capabilities of our compute cluster.